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Free-living songbirds show increased stress hormone levels when nesting under white street lights. But different light spectra may have different physiological effects as this study finds, suggesting that using street lights with specific colour spectra may mitigate effects of light pollution on wildlife

Remember winter, when everything was cold and grey? Right now, when all around is lush and green, the contrast couldn’t be greater. But is everything really as it seems? New research shows that we see things differently in winter compared with summer.

Last night, I retweeted Genomic Repairman’s request for the twitterverse to sign up for an account at LabSpaces. He wanted users to join in on the discussions he was having in the group he created. We were greeted moments later by a tweet from DrugMonkey saying that THE Facebook for science is dead. Considering I just wrote a blog post on that exact topic, I found his tweet Ironic. The emphasis in that previous post being that there probably will never be ONE single social hub for scientists, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of multiple niche venues. Please excuse me while I get this out of my system:

(rant)What exactly is a FaceBook for science anyway? Is any site with a science spin, groups, a forum, and/or user profiles a “FaceBook.” If that’s the case, then there are hundreds of FaceBooks for science out there. I’d argue that the term is deprecated. Many sites employ social tool . . . More

I recently got an e-mail from David Bradley asking my opinion of Web 2.0 as it relates to science, where it’s heading, and how we can get scientists more involved in web 2.0 / data sharing / and the semantic web. I thought this would be a great topic for me to write a real post on since I’ve been involved in this field and trying to promote the ideas of web 2.0 in the sciences for the last 5 years.

For starters, I really have no idea what it will take to get scientists to be fully engaged with the on-line world. It's hard enough to get them engaged in the real world (I wish that was a joke…). I think for most scientists to get involved with a network, we're going to have to develop something that significantly increases scientific productivity, and I'm not talking just a free reference management site or being able to post lab retreat pictures to a profile. The last 4-5 years have showed us that scientists really are not interested in FaceBooks for science. The marginal success of ResearchGate, NatureNetwork, and LabSpaces can't be cited as triumphs because very little of wh . . . More

If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

“Internet neutrality is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates NO restrictions by Internet Service Providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.”

Net Neutrality is all about safeguarding your freedom to choose what sites you visit, without being restricted or hindered. You should have the ability to check out both CNN and MSN, you should be able to watch videos on YouTube, and Vimeo. That sounds fair.

But what if for instance, and this is JUST an example, CNN were to strike a deal with an internet service provider and say hey, if we pay you some extra money, would you provide higher bandwidth to CNN sites and lower bandwidth to our competitors . . . More

What you’re looking at is the Terrafugia Transition. As the name suggests, it actually does transition between plane mode and car mode. In under 30 seconds no less! The transition itself is just the flip of a switch, which commands the wings to unfold and lock into place, or fold back up allowing you to drive away.

The car plane runs on regular gas, available at any gas station. How convenient! It even gets really good gas mileage in car mode, about 35 mpg. (Just like my pretty little civic did..)

This is a neat promo vid they made, kinda cheesy at times, but provides some good info. . . . More

I spent some time last night and today fixing up some high resolution images to upload to a Zazzle store. The bloggers have been nagging me for a junk shop pretty much since they started, so I figured it was important to them. I don't know about you all, but I'm definitely getting a mug or two and at least one shirt. Stop by the store and see the rest of the junk!

I was clued into a discussion earlier this morning by BiochemBelle about some misconceptions about what LabSpaces actually is. I will say that when I first read the comment by Ed Yong that LabSpaces is just another news aggregator (paraphrased) I was pretty upset. For one, the news (or "news") is only a small fraction of what LabSpaces is all about. If this was just a news site, I would have chosen to name the site "EurekAlert Science News Scraper". I thought that the vision of this site was covered pretty well in the "About" section, but Ed Yong is a busy guy and an all-star science writer/blogger, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here. What follows is a mock interview with Ed, I hope you enjoy.